Walid Saddam’s recent body of work turns its attention to the widening gap between the natural and the manufactured. For one thing, it considers the two kinds of carbon dioxide—one arising from the earth’s own respiration, the other that is a result of human industry and excess. His images study how this second type, generated through fossil fuels, deforestation, plastics, and fast fashion, now saturates both atmosphere and imagination. In looking at this, the work reflects on how comfort, convenience, and consumption have quietly shifted the planet’s equilibrium, drawing every human act into a loop of creation and erosion.
“Humans clothe their bodies to hide their fragility; trees wear nothing, and so we cut them down. Yet it is the naked trees that breathe for us.” This thought becomes the basis of his practice, a meditation on humanity’s distance from nature, our hunger for beauty and luxury and how this separates us from systems that sustain our lives. The narrative asks how we take part, knowingly or unknowingly, in this slow violence—how we breathe, wear and live through both forms of CO₂.
Walid’s works do not accuse but awaken. He invites viewers to consider how individual choices have ripple effects on collective ecological futures. What emerges is not only a portrait of crisis, but an invitation to imagine tenderness within consumption and to recognise the fragile thread that ties human breath to the world that keeps us alive.
Walid Saddam is a visual artist and musician from Kishoreganj, Bangladesh. His practice traverses ecology, identity, and human consciousness, shaped by his earlier occupations as a rickshaw-puller, teacher, salesman, and street-hawker. Drawing on poetry and music, he performs with his band and uses poetic realism and speculative narrative to question the unseen systems that govern our existence.
Working across photography and multimedia, including projects on the Rohingya refugee crisis and rising sexual violence in Bangladesh, Saddam evokes a tension between intimacy and vastness, where personal experience meets planetary concern. His creative language blends the rhythms and colour of Bangladesh with the visual and the poetic.
